Douglas Rushkoff is a professor media studies and a public school parent in New York. This is an adaptation of a presentation that he made to his local school board.
A SANE SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY FOR SCHOOLS
I am father of a 7th grader.
I am also the author of 17 books and four television documentaries about life in the digital media environment, a professor of media and society at CUNY, founder of its Laboratory for Digital Humanism, research fellow at Institute for the Future, and a frequent consultant on computers, education, and digital health to school districts, the US congress, the White House, the United Nations and governments around the world.
I am still enthusiastic about the promise of digital technology to enhance education and human potential. But I am also aware of who constructed our social media platforms, and for what purpose. Social media makes money by encouraging engagement – or what they call “eyeball hours” – by any means necessary. They employ advanced psychological tactics in order to make people – young and old – feel bad if they don’t check in regularly and worse if they try to leave a platform altogether.
The “streak” feature on SnapChat, for example, was developed in the Captology lab of Stanford University. Captology, as the name suggests, is the study of how to “capture” and maintain attention. The streak is simply a number corresponding to how many days in a row you chatted with a particular person. It’s also a way to turn socializing and posting into a competitive sport.
It will make anyone – even teachers and school administrators – feel terrible about missing a day of posting. It is just one of hundreds of techniques used by social media to make people anxious and depressed, such as adding pictures of your “ex” having fun to your newsfeed. Some techniques were drawn from Las Vegas slot machine algorithms, themselves based on decades of practice addicting gamblers to self-destructive behaviors.
My friends – the people who developed Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms – are now regretting what they did, but they are feeling powerless to change things. This is because the companies they work for are run by shareholders who simply want more hours, more posts, more engagement from us – by any means necessary.
Sean Parker, the ex-founder of Napster who guided young Mark Zuckerberg through the early days of Facebook, says the platform was built by “consciously exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” focused on figuring out “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'” Now Parker says he’s a “conscientious objector” from social media and worries “what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
These are America’s most powerful businesses, seeking to infiltrate our awareness. They are not only psychologically damaging, but intellectually compromising.
We multitask, assuming that – like our computers – we can do more than one thing at the same time. Study after study has shown that multitasking humans invariably get less done, less accurately, with less depth, and less understanding. This is true even when we believe we have accomplished more.
Other studies have shown that:
– we function poorly and remember less if our smart phone is in the same room, even if it is turned off.
– we read slower and with less comprehension if our email program is open in the background – even if the program’s window is completely covered.
– the algorithms of social media feeds can not only predict our future behavior, but change it. They intentionally discourage creative outcomes that defy their predictions or stray from our big data classifications. They actively and intentionally reduce innovative and non-conformist behavior.
– social media makes us less able to separate fact from fiction, makes us feel worse about our lives, lowers our self-esteem, and increases tribal, racial, and nativist divisions. It profits off polarity, sensationalism, violence, and impulsiveness.
As my friend, the inventor of virtual reality Jaron Lanier puts it, “The popular platforms are designed for behavior modification. Why would you go sign up for an evil hypnotist who’s explicitly saying that his whole purpose is to get you to do things that people have paid him to get you to do, but he won’t tell you who they are?”
A school district may have real reasons for resorting social media, but if they do so, they should at least be conscious of the compromise they are making, and the specific goals they are pursuing.
For instance, a district with poor community relations may seek to improve them by posting pictures on social media feeds. If attendance at school events is low, or if the town is too big for people to be exposed to schoolchildren, social media can be used to promote more enthusiasm for events, or passage of a school budget or bond issue. But in communities where people have face-to-face contact, social media does not improve relationships or institutional affiliations; research shows that it degrades them.
A famously bad school district can use social media to chronicle and publicize its turnaround to the world at large. This can help attract new families to the district, increase property values, and, in turn, increase the tax base. Again, most districts are not in need of such rehabilitation, and do better at fixing their problems when they’re not under a spotlight.
Social media can help school administrators and employees promote their perspectives and careers. An educator may implement a classroom approach and want to publicize it – both to share best practices with other educators or to position themself for a better job somewhere else or even just better book sales. That’s fine, but it makes the classroom secondary to some other agenda, and turns the students into unwitting promotional tools. Better to do this on a website or blog than a competitive and manipulative social media platform, anyway.
Finally, when teachers or administrators are using social media in the classroom or at school activities, it models the addictive, life-negating behavior that we don’t want our kids to emulate. If teachers are looking for social media opportunities during the school day, then they are being distracted from the face-to-face, in-person contact that defines classroom education. Taking a selfie with a student, however well-meaning, conveys that the moment is less significant than the Tweet. Sad. I want my kid to feel that what she’s accomplished in class matters in its own right, even if it is not posted to Facebook!
Social media should not be mistaken for the internet. These platforms are categorically different than a school’s website. They are private companies, using black-box technologies to sell data about us and use it against us in ways they themselves are appalled by. Steve Jobs did not let his kids use an iPad. The Facebook employees I know will not let their kids go to schools that use social media.
Social media companies have spent billions of dollars developing algorithmically charged, adaptive mind control methodologies – as well as propaganda and government lobbying on why these activities make us stronger, smarter, more popular, happier, richer, and more loved. It’s very hard to fight this psychological manipulation, and the more we use social media, the more we accept its premies.
Right now, those of us in the digital trenches are dealing with a problem named “Elsagate” – hundreds of videos targeting children that have been designed to pass through YouTube’s safety filters so that they appear in the pre-approved YouTube Kids’ Channel. They depict stories such as baby Elsa (from Disney’s Frozen) stealing her parents liquor, drinking it, turning violent, and killing her sister; another shows baby Spiderman being raped by his father; and other scenes calculated by their makers to inflict psychological trauma on American children. It’s a pediatric form of the same memetic warfare used against American adults in the last presidential election cycle. We still don’t know who is behind them.
They get through YouTube’s algorithms because those algorithms are not really there to help kids. They are there to help advertisers reach kids, and to make humans more predictable, less coherent, more anxious, and less genuinely social. This space favors the trolls, the abusers, and the marketers. It’s hard enough raising kids; now theres’ a multi-trillion-dollar industry working overtime to make our kids less cooperative, more irritable, and hyper-reactive. And we’re already required to surrender our kids to these companies, because so much education is happening online.
Making money is not bad. But making money by abusing people through intentionally addictive technologies *is* bad. The Internet is fabulous public utility. Social media are privately owned platforms operated so maliciously that they constitute public health crisis.
In short, social media really has no place in school. Sure, we can use it as an example in our media literacy classes. We can teach how the business model works, the attention economy on which it is based, the algorithmic logic of its choices, and the behavioral manipulation embedded in its interfaces. But we mustn’t post our kids pictures, promote our school activities, or start important policy conversations on networks entirely unfit for the purpose.
This shouldn’t stop schools from running their own websites, posting announcements and pictures when appropriate, and giving parents the ability to opt-out on behalf of their children. The same goes for running articles and photos in local papers, which are our true media partners serving community interests.
We must not let our own addiction to social media cloud our judgment about how to educate our children and represent our schools or districts. Keep this stuff out of the classroom until you understand who’s behind it, how it works, and how it is influencing your choices.
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Douglas Rushkoff is the host of TeamHuman a professor of media studies, and the author of books including Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Program or Be Programmed.
Um, what exactly is an “ex-founder”? Is he trying to disown his involvement in Napster? Sorry, doesn’t work that way. He can repent, but he can’t disown what he’s responsible for.
Dienne, I guess it does mean “now regretful founder.” You’re right, he can’t disown it.
I’m sure he’s deeply regretful of his $2.4 billion net worth.
Somehow, I doubt that he’s regretful enough to give most of that money to the cause of improving public schools.
I hear he weeps all day long about it, every day.
I’ll be sure and send him a box of generic tissues.
Completely agree. But: How can someone be an “ex-founder”?
truth
Rushkoff is a smart guy and there is much here that I agree with, but I’m puzzled by the non-sequiturs, like these
“That’s fine, but it makes the classroom secondary to some other agenda, and turns the students into unwitting promotional tools. Better to do this on a website or blog…” If it’s bad to do this, why is it better to do it on a website or blog?
“Social media should not be mistaken for the internet….Steve Jobs did not let his kids use an iPad.” The iPad should not be mistaken for the internet or social media either.
I am also confused by the idea “that social media should not be mistaking for the Internet.” The Internet is the master platform enabling the proliferation of ad driven social media. The platform is no longer neutral.
On April 3, 2017 Trump signed into law Senate Joint Resolution 34 (S.J. Res. 34), a measure that allows Internet service providers (ISPs) such as AT&T/Direct TV, Century Link, Comcast/Xfinity, Cox Communications, Frontier, Time Warner/Spectrum, Verizon and hundreds of others to operate with freedom from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) privacy rules first established in 1934 with several changes intended to keep up with a changing telecommunications landscape.
Trump and his allies in Congress targeted a last minute change from the Obama Administration (December 2, 2016, Public Law No: 115-22). With little fanfare, Trump and Congress have nullified, abandoned, wiped out rules “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.” Trump and Congress nullified Internet neutrality rules.
Your ISP is now free to gather, analyze, and sell your browsing history without asking your permission. The data can be gathered from multiple devices–your computer, tablet, phone, car, television, and other Internet connected of things you use. You can be charged more for faster service, larger data allowance, ad blocking, and access to search engines, websites and so on.
Major ISPs will be able to promote their own media companies. They can prevent access to offerings of competitors or charge more for making those programs available. Fifty-one percent of people in the US have access to only one ISP. It is not certain that setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN ) might work to prevent data-gathering for commercial use.
I have tried without success to find out the end of net neutrality will influence e-rates (ISP discounts) or schools and libraries. It is worth noting that the pushers of online education have been so irresponsible, or so eager to game federal laws bearing on data privacy in schools, that 39 states have passed 106 laws since 2013. Some of these laws are actually designed to authorize vendors of educational software to gather students’ and teacher’s personal identity information (PII) in order to “improve” service. Most are trying to prevent the use of multiple “third party” clauses that put the full responsibility for data privacy on schools.
The marketing of EdTEch is proceeding with only a few whistleblowers breaking through the hype. This post is important, but there are also international efforts to consider the ethics of delegating so much power to platforms and software and those who engineer these. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/13/telecom-cash-isp/
For the last several years The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has enlisted several hundred key people from six continents, to identify and try to a reach consensus on socially responsible uses intelligent and autonomous systems and technologies including ethical principles that give priority to human well-being in a given cultural context.
They hope to have a consensus version in 2019. Issues in this version report range from profiling individuals, as is common on Facebook, Amazon and other websites, to protecting personal identifiable information, the“right to be forgotten, legal issues and moral hazards in designing autonomous machines (cars, robots, weapons of war), and unintended consequences from biased or error ridden data. The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
See http://standards.ieee.org/develop/indconn/ec/autonomous_systems.html
“A Sane Social Media Policy for America’s Classrooms” seems to be, in Rushkoff’s and Diane’s opinion, none whatsoever. While I agree with everything Rushkoff says about commercial social media, he does not mention social media platforms developed particularly for educational environments, like Edmodo, for example. Or MIT’s Scratch online community. This later forum revolves around creative content and is based on research by the university. Just because there are giant commercial social media platforms doesn’t mean that there can’t be other kinds, more appropriately designed to use in schools. I have seen firsthand as a teacher the benefits of kids using educational social media to share and talk about their work, and at the same time, learn how to be good digital citizens – by learning and making mistakes in a safe environment.
Edmodo is a giant in the world of edtech, and this why enthusiasms for edtech need to be tempered with a careful look at who controls the data.
DATA BREACH ALERT!
77 Million Email Addresses and Passwords Stolen from Education Website Edmodo… July 18, 2017. | Errol Janusz.
A hacker has stolen millions of user account details from popular education platform Edmodo, and the data is apparently for sale on the dark web. Teachers, students and …
edwardtechnology | IT BLOG
https://www.edwardtechnology.com/it-blog
This country is a mess.
‘You are being programmed,’ former Facebook executive warns
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42322746
This is great – I am so appreciative. Please read this piece by Bill Fitzgerald.
https://funnymonkey.com/2016/students-and-social-media
I just got a notice from FB saying they have great new facial recognition features, and will show me posts from all over that include my face and other exciting tools. At the same time, they wanted me to click a button agreeing that FB can track my face. I hit the other button, saying I do not want FB to track my face.
The notice seemed manipulative, persuading me to forego my right to privacy and control over my likeness – but I’m actually grateful they gave me a choice, after they have doing it so long without permission.
I wonder if someone started suing them or this is the influence of the “ex-founders” telling them to be better?
Been kinda busy lately and didn’t have time to properly respond with how much I agree with all here. Just want to say a quick ‘like’ to this post.